Answering Echo

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O who will show me those delights on high? Echo. I. Thou Echo, thou art mortal, all men know. Echo. No.

—George Herbert (1593-1633), "Heaven"

A character asks a question out loud. A voice answers — but not in its own words, just repeating the last few words of the character’s question. The voice in question may just be an echo of the character’s voice; in which case they may or may not mistake it for another character. If the answering voice is in fact a separate entity, expect the character asking the question to assume the answering voice is their own echo, whether or not it sounds like them.

"What right," said I, "had the old gentleman to make any other gentleman jump? The little old dot-and-carry-one! who is he? If he asks me to jump, I won't do it, that's flat, and I don't care who the devil he is." The bridge, as I say, was arched and covered in, in a very ridiculous manner, and there was a most uncomfortable echo about it at all times—an echo which I never before so particularly observed as when I uttered the four last words of my remark.

The aria "Treues Echo dieser Orten" from Johann Sebastian Bach's secular cantata Hercules auf dem Scheidewege. Much of the music of this cantata, including this aria, was adapted into the fourth part of the Christmas Oratorio.

The Inquisition in Bernstein's Candide delivers its judgments this way.

Three Inquisitors: Are our methods legal or illegal? Basses: Legal! Three Inquisitors: Are we judges of the law, or laymen? Basses: Amen. Three Inquisitors: Shall we hang them or forget them? Basses: Get them!

In The Golden Apple, after Ulysses has lost all of his friends, he questions himself about love, faith, hope and dreams. Mother Hare and the chorus echo his words as somewhere in space they hang suspended.

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